Jonathan Larson's updating of La Boheme hit just the right tone, both
musically and thematically, to speak to young people of the 1990s with
much the same excitement and immediacy as Hair had for their parents a
quarter-century earlier. But although the original is still running on
Broadway, British revivals have sometimes lost that edge, the musical
becoming as much a period piece as Hair would be if revived.

This
new production, labelled 'Rent Remixed,' and featuring some reordering
of songs, new lyrics and new arrangements, does have an
audience-pleasing energy. But, perhaps inevitably, it has lost a lot of
the original's sense of reality and community. How much that bothers
you will very likely depend on your age.

Before I go any further, I have to point out that this show was not
written for boring old codgers like me or some of the newspaper critics
who really hated it. My almost-14-year-old companion loved it, and most
of the 20-somethings in the audience clearly had a good time. So take
the criticisms that follow as things one notices if one isn't caught up
in the show but probably wouldn't be bothered by if it worked for you.

(A reminder: as in the opera that inspired it, a community of starving
artists take in a sick girl, who has a romance with one of them. The
setting is New York's boho slum Lower East Side, the characters include
an aspiring filmmaker, a musician and a performance artist, and the
opera's tuberculosis has been replaced by heroin and HIV.)

The
first thing that goes wrong with this revival is Mark Bailey's design,
with both set and costumes far too stylish and expensive-looking to be
believable as the milieu of poverty. William Baker's direction and
Ashley Wallen's choreography are either over-busy or cluttered, with so
much extraneous bustling about that you can't focus, so that even the
best numbers, like La Vie Boheme, don't register as fully as they
should.

And the performances, for all their energy and expertise, lack the
underlying sense of reality. There is no getting away from the
awareness that these are all nice middle class British lads and lasses
playing at being bohemians, drug addicts and Aids victims.

And
so some of the basic character and plot elements don't fully work. I
never really felt the romance of Leon Lopez' Collins and Jay Webb's
Angel, or Angel's benevolent and loving influence on the others.

Oliver
Thornton rather belatedly catches the ambiguous position of the
filmmaker Mark, always watching through his lens instead of living, and
Luke Evans conveys Roger's conflicted feelings for Mimi, but I didn't
believe for a minute that Siobhan Donaghy's Mimi was either dying or
addicted.

Denise Van Outen does what amounts to a guest star turn as the
performance artist Maureen, and it doesn't help that her one big number
is the weakest in the show, though she and Francesca Jackson do later
generate some steam in their duet Take Me Or Leave Me.

The other good songs, Today 4 U, Tango Maureen, La Vie Boheme, Seasons
Of Love, score best when done simply, without too much directorial or
musical embellishment.

In every show that gets revived, be it Shakespeare or a musical comedy,
there is one scene or moment that becomes a touchstone - will they do
it as well here as they did in the original? For me the moment in Rent
comes when a scene about something else is interrupted by someone's
pocket alarm going off, and half the characters pause to take their
Aids medication. It was chilling a dozen years ago, but goes by almost
unnoticed here.

And
it's that edge, of reality underlying or poking through the pretty
songs and dances, that I miss.